Network Programming with Perl

"This is a superb book. Another splendid book from Lincoln, whose mastery and lucid exposition make this a must-have for the serious Perl programmer."
--Jon Orwant, Chief Technology Officer, O'Reilly & Associates
Founder of The Perl Journal, author of Mastering Algorithms with Perl, (O'Reilly & Associates)
and co-author of Programming Perl, Third Edition (O'Reilly & Associates)

Network Programming with Perl is a comprehensive, example-rich guide to creating network-based applications using the Perl programming language. Among its many capabilities, modern Perl provides a straightforward and powerful interface to TCP/IP, and this book shows you how to leverage these capabilities to create robust, maintainable, and efficient custom client/server applications.

The book quickly moves beyond the basics to focus on high-level, application programming concepts, tools, and techniques. Readers will find a review of basic networking concepts and Perl fundamentals, including Perl's I/O functions, process model, and object-oriented extensions. In addition, the book examines a collection of the best third-party modules in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, including existing network protocols for e-mail, news, and the Web.

The core of the book focuses on methods and alternatives for designing TCP-based client/server systems and more advanced techniques for specialized applications. Specific topics covered include:

• The Berkeley Sockets API

• The TCP protocol and the IO::Socket API

• FTP filesharing service

• The Net::Telnet module for adapting clients to interactive network services

• SMTP, including how to create and send e-mails with multimedia attachments

• POP, IMAP, and NNTP for receiving and processing e-mail

• HTTP and the LWP module for communicating with Web servers

• Forking servers and the UNIX and Windows inetd daemons

• Perl's experimental multithreaded API

• Multiplexed operations and nonblocking I/O

• Bulletproofing servers

• TCP urgent data

• UDP protocol and servers

• Broadcasting and multicasting

• Interprocess communication with UNIX-domain sockets

Useful, working programs demonstrate ideas and techniques in action, including a real-time chat and messaging system, a program for processing e-mail containing MIME attachments, a program for mirroring an FTP site, and a Web robot.

Network Programming with Perl focuses on TCP/IP rather than just the common Web protocols. Modeled after the critically acclaimed TCP/IP Illustrated by W. Richard Stevens, this book achieves a level of detail far superior to most. It is an essential resource for network administrators and Perl programmers who are creating network applications.

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